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Just ride this down the street and watch the hipster-blood splatter.

Deep and abiding is far from an adequate way to describe my devotion to the works of  Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. He effortlessly makes the mundane unearthly.

But like many a Murakami fan, my breathless endorsement reaches a hiccup on the subject of “Norwegian Wood.” While it was his breakthrough hit in Japan, it’s a sharp departure from the mystical alleyways of Tokyo that he usually frequents. A narrowly focused love story, it’s as short and tangled with sexual resentment as the Beatles tune Murakami derived its title from.

French-Vietnamese director Anh Hung Tran has taken on the task of adapting the novel to film. A promising venture since the last Murakami work brought to the screen – Jun Ichikawa’s beautifully spare and relentlessly depressing “Tony Takitani” – was widely praised. Tran’s film looks to be on the same path. Though it’s set to open in Japan in December, it will premiere in September at the Venice Film Festival, where it’s already up for the Golden Lion Award.

A “Norwegian Wood” teaser trailer was released a few days ago. Only 30 seconds long, it makes excellent use of the plinky, plaintive tone (maybe the most stripped-down sitar sound commited to tape) of the Beatles song. If the trailer is any indication, this bird will fly, too.

Once Google became a daily and unconscious part of the day, I started getting the feeling that somehow it would be possible for search results to show, well, results…of things that had not yet happened. Ridiculous, no? Maybe not so much. Google (and a little outfit called the CIA) have invested in Recorded Future (Orwellian by way of Disraeli motto: “What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.”).

Recorded Future is a search engine (it seems to prefer to call itself a “temporal analytics engine”) with three boxes: What, Who/Where and When. The “When” is where things get interesting. Instead of the usual search field date restriction of the present, the “When” goes boldly into the future to scan everything from Twitter feeds to government documents to map patterns and forecast an outcome.

As you may have already predicted, the future isn’t free (it’s $149 a month).

There is simply no other group of three letters that has a bigger impact on the way we use technology. DRM is the bane of your existence and you may not even know it. It was created under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as an attempt by legislators to protect copyright holders’ wealth, as digital copying became ubiquitous. The only problem is that it was outdated in a matter of months, possibly days and, in some people’s perceptions,  instantaneously. Suddenly, all that sharing we were doing ended. But then, we couldn’t even copy our own music for ourselves. I couldn’t share that which I legally purchased with friends like we used to with mix tapes.

Thankfully, change is a brew. Check out Gizmodo’s full-coverage of the recent revisions to the act, carried out by the Librarian himself.

When I was little I used to spend those last drowsy moments before sleep trying to consciously pixelate the darkness. When the effort to keep my eyes open got to be too much, I’d switch to marveling at the spidering bursts I’d see with them closed. That’s pretty much the point and effect of writer, artist and visionary Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine.

On display at the New Museum as part of a Gysin retrospective, the Dreamachine is a pierced rotating cylinder filled with light. In the Beat quest for any and all altering experiences, it’s designed to reproduce the alpha waves the brain emits immediately before sleep to achieve both relaxation and heightened awareness. Gysin developed the device with computer programmer, electronics technician and “systems adviser” to William S. Burroughs, Ian Sommerville.

Eager to recreate the spectacular flashes of my childhood game, I followed the instructions and sat six to eight inches away from the Dreamachine and closed my eyes. For a few minutes I saw the same spectacular and hypnotic flashes of color I remembered. But there’s no recreating a five-year-old’s marvel; ultimately all I saw were just flickers of the past.

There’s not really a more perfect time for a cup of tea than a rainy Sunday afternoon. The Lower East Side prepared for just this circumstance with days-old Jujomukti Tea Lounge.

Serving hot (in three categories – classic, challenger and premium) and iced varieties, Jujomukti is strictly about the tea; there’s nothing to  nibble on and concessions to coffee lovers extend only to flagging robust, super-caffeinated blends.

The teas are delicately fragrant with a taste that does not, thankfully, translate into liquid potpourri, even with the fruity Asian Treasures. If you desire to up the taste or healtfulness of your selection, there’s a list of natural extracts and tinctures.

The staff goes out of their way to be helpful to patrons (a bit sparse on this visit) and passersby alike and they were eager to note that Jujomukti will soon be host to a variety of events, including Bollywood movie nights.

Like the apartment of a recent college graduate, Jujomukti is furnished with some mismatched hand-me-downs, items from those DIY Swedes and lighting from Urban Outfitters. Brick walls and a little bronze paint and curtains help the charm factor. Like the grads it emulates, Jujomukti aspires to “liberation” and “universal freedom” (the meaning behind its name) and also like them, its future holds lots of promise.

Jujomukti Tea Lounge
211 E 4th St (near Avenue A)
New York, NY 10009
(212) 533-4075